


I Just Came To Say Hello

by taormina



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Outing, Aromantic Natasha Romanov, Aromanticism, Clintasha - Freeform, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, hints at asexuality, pizzas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 15:58:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4398158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taormina/pseuds/taormina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Clint was safety and warmth and everything that her missions weren’t." </p><p>— Clint finds out that Natasha is aromantic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Just Came To Say Hello

**Author's Note:**

> This is just my own interpretation of what it's like to be aromantic.

Natasha knew perfectly well that what she and Clint had wasn’t conventional, not even for superspy standards. Sometimes they didn’t even see or speak to each other for days on end: Clint would be too busy getting his neck deep into some tough shit in his own neighbourhood, and Natasha would be God knows where, digging up the latest government secrets that Hill or Fury asked her to. They didn’t even call or text most of the time; Natasha would just show up at Clint’s door, all battered and bruised and bloodied, and Clint would let her in, no questions asked.

Sometimes they had slow, intimate sex, with Clint kissing the pain away until Natasha felt better. Most times they didn’t.

Sometimes Clint tried cuddling her. Most times Natasha would jump off the sofa and pretend she wanted to order pizza online.

Most of the time Natasha liked kissing Clint, but sometimes all she wanted to do is listen to him talk.  

At the end of the day, Natasha just really, _really_ liked hanging out at Clint’s messy apartment, the both of them sipping tasteless coffee while he told her what he’d been up to that day or that week. He’d tell her about this or that criminal that he beat up at a casino or a swimming pool or whatever, and how Katie stole his Hawkeye mug for the third time in a row. (‘Not cool, dude! I swear to God I’m going to steal her signed Ant-Man cereal bowl one day. That’ll teach her, the punk!’)

Halfway through Clint’s stories Natasha would usually fall asleep and wake up the next morning with a blanket draped over her body and Clint still caressing her hair.

She always woke up at six, and he always made her breakfast at 6:30.

Clint’s apartment was the only place where Natasha truly felt she could sleep. She never really slept on missions, not even in the fabricated comforts of safe houses. No matter how hard she tried, she could never quite shake the feeling that someone was watching her. That someone would climb through her window and slit her throat. She never had that feeling with Clint. Clint was safety and warmth and everything that her missions weren’t.

It was a cold, breezy November. Drops of rain ran down the dirty windows of Clint’s living room. She’d had another mission this week. One in Germany this week, protecting innocent civilians from an imminent terrorist attack on a big establishment with ties to some underground organization, that sort of thing. She’d flown straight back to the States the moment her mission was done. She was still wearing the battered winter jacket that she’d worn to Berlin.

Despite the toughness of her mission, she’d felt awake and willing enough to have a shower with Clint. They didn’t have sex; Natasha simply allowed Clint to scrub the dirt and blood off her body, and they went to bed tangled up in each other’s arms like they usually did.

She woke up the next morning at six, staring into Clint’s eyes.

And he called her his “girlfriend”.

‘Mornin’,’ Clint grumbled. He propped himself up on one elbow and rubbed his eyes. He looked like he was still in the middle of falling asleep and waking up, but it didn’t stop him from looking at Natasha like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. ‘How’s my beautiful girlfriend this morning?’

 _Girlfriend_.

Natasha felt like she’d been punched into the gut. Like her internal organs were grinded into pulp while her head was being held underwater.

She knew Clint would use that word one day. She knew that someone, one day, would try that word on her, and imagining it happen always made her feel uncomfortable and so, so sick. She hated nothing more than the idea of being claimed by someone like that. She was a spy, and a good one at that; being someone’s _something_ was not part of her package. It did not suit her.

_It did not suit her._

Natasha got up from the bed, yanking the sheet from the bed and wrapping it around her body. She’d slept in Clint’s bed naked that night. A mistake, clearly.

‘Don’t call me that,’ she whined. Normally she was good at controlling her breathing. She could even control her heartbeat if she tried — being close friends with Matt Murdock had made that particular skill a necessity. But now? With Clint looking at her like she was some wounded animal? Her heart rate was out of the _roof_.

Clint blinked. ‘What word? “ _Beautiful_?” C’mon, Tasha, you know you look great in the morning,’ he added in an attempt at superfluous flirting. He reached out to grab her hand, but Natasha jerked her body away from him.

‘I don’t like it when you call me that, all right? “Girlfriend”, I mean. It gives me the creeps,’ she huffed when Clint raised his hands in confusion. ‘And while we’re at it, you can stop asking me out on dates. Sorry, Barton,’ she added softly.

She didn’t want to hurt Clint’s feeling with her incessant moaning, but she didn’t feel like explaining herself today, either. She’d get to that later. When they weren’t both naked, and when she wasn’t still repeating the images from yesterday’s mission in her head. She got dressed in the bathroom, collected her belongings from the floor and left to a chorus of “Wait! Tasha! C’mon! I’m sor—‘before she closed the door behind her gently.

She wasn’t his girlfriend.

Girlfriends were expected to do things she wasn’t comfortable with.

Natasha did things she wasn’t comfortable with _every day_ ; couldn’t there be **one** aspect of her life where she _wasn’t_ expected to do things that were out of her comfort zone?

Clint left her a lot of messages on her private cell that day. And the day after. The “idiot” (Natasha’s words, not ours) even asked her out a few times, saying they could go see or this that movie without referring to it as a date. Which essentially _was_ a date.

But Natasha still kept showing up at his door after a mission for a chat and a shower, and at one point Clint just dropped the subject. He stopped himself from calling her “girlfriend” and “honey”, and straight up stopped touching her unless Natasha specifically asked for it. Natasha didn’t seem to mind, and they stopped touching each other altogether unless Nat had a wound that needed stitching.

She still kept falling asleep on his sofa, though, and Clint spent the next few weeks generally feeling very confused indeed.

One day after he’d had one too many pints of beer (and pizza; so much pizza), Clint told Steve about Natasha’s behaviour. About how they never really had sex anymore, and that they still talked and laughed and acted like a couple, but _weren’t_ one. They weren’t even going on dates! No dates! Ever!

Steve looked at Clint warily, like he was trying to decide whether to let him in on a secret. He then shook his head as though suddenly changing his mind, and he got up from the sofa and returned a minute later with his Stark Tablet™. He turned it on, tapped something, and showed Clint a Wikipedia page that was in English, but not the sort of English that Clint understood.

‘What’s this?’ Clint placed the tablet on his lap. Lucky the dog was lying next to him on the sofa, eating leftover pizza. He scrolled down a short page that was full of incomprehensible words.

Steve took a sip of his beer. He cringed as though the beer tasted awful and put the glass back down. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Natasha didn’t tell you about this?’

Clint started petting Lucky. He was beginning to feel very nervous. ‘About what?’

Steve crossed his arms, which made him look even bigger on Clint’s tiny red sofa. ‘Look, Natasha will probably kill me if I tell you this – rightly so, I’d say –, but she’s aromantic, pal.’

Clint knew he sometimes had trouble hearing, but nothing about that sentence made sense. At all. ‘Arrow . . .?’

Lucky finished his pizza.

‘Aromantic.’

‘What, she’s an _air_ freshener now?’

Steve chuckled. Lucky hopped off the sofa and started towards him as though an extra slice of pizza may be hidden underneath his biceps. ‘No. It just means she doesn’t feel romantic attraction like you and me. I don’t —’ He rubbed Lucky’s neck while he tried to gather his thoughts. ‘I’m not in the position to speak for her – she’s perfectly capable of doing that on her own, I think –, but I don’t think she feels the need to be in a romantic relationship. She _does_ like you, Barton,’ he added when he saw Clint disappear further and further into the sofa, ‘She just doesn’t like —’ He waved his hands as though attempting to pull the correct words out of the air. ‘Cuddling. Holding hands. Dating, even. That sort of thing.’

Clint looked as white as a ghost; not because he hated the idea of a non-romantic Natasha (he didn’t), but because he hadn’t noticed it in the first place. _Stupid, stupid Clint._

Everything about how Natasha had been acting lately made so much more sense now. It was as though he suddenly saw everything – his bedroom, Steve, his messy apartment, but mostly _her_ – with perfect vision.

He should have spotted it before.

‘I’ve been trying to ask her out all the time!’ Clint sighed, feeling more and more thoughtless by the second. He let Steve’s tablet drop onto the sofa. He didn’t even need to read the Wikipedia page; Steve words had clarified everything. ‘She must hate me.’

Steve smiled at him warmly. ‘She really doesn’t, you know.’

Clint fingered a spot on his jeans where the fabric was beginning to unravel. He really needed to buy new jeans. Perhaps he and Natasha could go out to buy some. Not “go out” go out, just . . . leave the apartment and do some shopping. Natasha would probably enjoy that; she _did_ always like doing things with a purpose. It would probably explain why she wasn’t into dating that much.

He looked at Steve. Lucky was in the middle of slobbering him. ‘So how did you . . .?’

‘I was looking into how sexuality has changed since the 20th century.’ Clint raised his eyebrows, but he wisely kept quiet. ‘I wanted to know more about it, so Natasha helped me looked things up online. Aromanticism came up and Natasha stayed up all night reading articles about it. That’s when I figured she might not be that big on romance.’ He paused. ‘But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for the other stuff.’

The day after the next Natasha showed up at Clint’s again. She had bruises all over her face, and Clint let her in without a word. Twenty minutes and a shower later Clint ended up reading the newspaper to her while she lay on his lap. After fifteen minutes, he stopped mid-sentence.

Natasha looked up at him. A big bruise painted her cheek yellow and blue. ‘What’s wrong?’

He put down the newspaper. It fell from the sofa onto the floor, and Lucky picked it up and ran away with it. ‘Will you please tell me whenever you’re not comfortable with something? Like, hugging and . . . stuff like that?’

Natasha straightened. Her heart started racing. _Stupid Clint and his stupid, perfect intentions._ ‘You’ve been talking to Steve, haven’t you?’

Clint hesitated. ‘Yeah.’

‘What’d he tell you?’

‘That you’re crazy about me, but that you’re not that crazy about romance.’

Natasha fumbled with her sleeves; she was wearing one of Clint’s favourite Captain America hoodies. A hopeful smile seemed to be playing on her lips. ‘Does that bother you?’ she asked quietly.

Clint had had a lot of time to think about Natasha and what she meant to him over the past few days. He really, really liked her, and if spending more time together meant spending less time touching and kissing and perhaps never going out on a date with her, he was all right with that. He didn’t need to slap a label on her to know how much she meant to him, girlfriend or not. He shook his head. ‘No.’ And he meant it.

Natasha smiled for the first time that night. ‘Good.’

Clint and Natasha slept in till nine the next morning.


End file.
